Kerbal Space Program, Revisited.

[Enigma]

But can you burn up upon re-entry?

[J Ryan]

But can you burn up upon re-entry?

Just visual and audio affects for now, you can still aerobrake a brick from intersteller speeds if you want

[TimothyC]

Orbital Skydiving







Jeb lives thanks to an EVA parachute!

[Enigma]

Hilarious! I'd like them to make the Kerbals turn into charcoal briquettes when re-entering.

[ChaserGrey]

Just getting back into this myself. So-so constructor, but pretty good naviguesser. If I find time later I'll post some pictures, but basically at this point my program is:

• A station in Kerbin orbit
• A pretty simple surface-orbit ferry
• A couple of nuclear tugs to dock onto various bits and take them elsewhere in the system
• A vacuum-only lander with some slight issues (see below)
• A VTVL jet-rocket demonstrator, officially the "Kangaroo" and unofficially known as "Whistling Death"

Just tried my first landing, on Minimus. Perfectly successful up until the point that I had excessive horizontal drift, crashed, and left two Kerbonauts stranded there in a lander cabin that somehow, miraculously survived. I'm taking it as a chance to excel by rescuing them.

[PeZook]

I have long since given up on manual landings and just use enslaved biomechanical abominations to do it for me.

[DarkArk]

Why is docking next to impossible? I just spent 5 hours (and three launches) getting my refueler craft up to my station and docked properly. Is there some special trick to it? Should it be higher up in orbit so that it's slower? I was at 200,000m, I put it up to 400,000 once I got my station refueled for when I try again. Landing on the Mun seems easier than this.

The offending station:

[Imperial528]

My easiest dock was my first, at 336km and a circular orbit with a variance of only a few meters, all manually done too. The craft ended up within 12m of the target on the first past, which is of course so close I thought they were going to hit each other and docking followed shortly. Now, the key to that is that the station was launched, and then the craft shortly afterwards, so matching orbits was very easy as Kerbin hadn't moved much.

In general it depends on a lot of factors such as craft balance and time to maneuver, and such. Some of my easiest docks have been with my LKO station that sits at around 160km. Or maybe it was 100km. Can't recall exactly at the moment. So have some of my hardest, mind you, though those had badly balanced ships to be honest, as they were fuel modules.

[PeZook]

Use Mechjeb. Seriously, cancelling out velocities is SUCH a pain without it!

[DarkArk]

I have been using Mechjeb. Though I've mostly been using it to get orbits lined up and taking off on the correct launch window. There's a way to cancel out velocities? Under what tab? I'll have to look it over again.

[PeZook]

I assume that if you can match orbits, then you can select targets, right? When you do, Mechjeb gets some new functions related to the target, the relevant ones here being RVEL+ and RVEL- and well as PAR+ and PAR-. The rendezvous module window also displays your relative velocity.

So the procedure I use is simple: approach to within a hundred metres or so (sometimes less, depending on the sizes of both spacecraft), cancel out rvel with the RVEL buttons ; Select the docking port I want as target, switch to my own docking port using "control from here" ; get into the initial position with RCS ; Cancel out RVEL again, tell smart A.S.S. to keep the active spacecraft parallel and dock with RCS and the chase camera.

Easy.

[DarkArk]

Interesting. But that wasn't really my problem. Once I got to within 500m or so I was able to do it no real problem. My problem was lining up orbits correctly such that both would be on top of each other. I was always 1-4 km away, and either too far forward or too far behind in my orbit from the station (which was perfect and equal to the equator).

[Scottish Ninja]

1-4km is fine - a >10km intercept was usually good enough for me. Once you've matched velocities at that range, it's fairly trivial just to burn towards your target (no more than 20m/s at longer range, usually). You'll have to stop and correct several times on your way but that's easy enough anyway; any time your distance to target starts increasing again, stop, reorient, and burn again. Eventually you'll be in the exact right position and velocity.

[PeZook]

At 4 km one burn might even be enough, and frankly it's next to impossible to get it any closer than that without some VERY detailed maths and precise maneuvering.

[Imperial528]

PeZook, you are of weak vision!

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/7739 ... ot2715.png

Behold! The standard intersect seperation for all of my rendezvous operations.

[DarkArk]

So basically I was being too demanding of myself and should have burned earlier, because it's totally possible at that range? Noted. Time to try out v19 I guess.

[Imperial528]

Usually when I can't line up the intersection on the first few maneuvers I just line up the orbits with just a bit off (or if I want to do it quick I put my orbit to an elliptical one) and orbit until they line up. Of course this usually requires a very quick burn to immediately match velocities so it doesn't work well with low acceleration designs. The elliptical, that is. Circular just takes a long time.

[PeZook]

So basically I was being too demanding of myself and should have burned earlier, because it's totally possible at that range? Noted. Time to try out v19 I guess.

Even the shuttle did not begin what is called "proximity operations" phases of rendezvous before approaching to within 1km ; Approaching that close without doing all the complex maths and planning is actually pretty good (well, yeah, KSP is vastly easier than real spaceflight, but still... )

You're doing perfectly fine.

[Imperial528]

Got a decent station up and running:
Spoiler

Lights, because Space is Dark.

[OmegaChief]

So it was late at night, I was bored, booted up my slightly out of date copy of KSP, threw together a random rocket as I had a little inspiration, launched surprisingly well.

Get close to the Mun, and as my previous posts here have made clear, I'm pretty terrible at this, I mean I don't use mechjeb, I'm not very good at physics, I'm totally going off the Mk 1 eyeball and stick here. Somehow I make an almost perfect vertical decent, with only about 10-20 m/s horizontal velocity.

I touch down, bounc a few times, topple over and there's an explosion! It's only a few of the extra support ladders though, so retract gear, rextend... an almost perfect landing!



I had fuel to spare too! It was only slightly marred by Jeb tumbling into the solar panels on his way down but... I have finally landed on the Mun in one peice on a rocket that can concivably take off again! Holy moly I was not expecting to be able to do this!

[Dave]

Nice job, OmegaChief! A good landing is always a good feeling. Looks like you have enough fuel to make it home, too -- though I'm not spotting a parachute on this side...

[GuppyShark]

No parachute isn't a deal breaker, you can probably recover him without drama if you can get him anywhere near Kerbal.

[Imperial528]

Yeah, just get him in a nice circular orbit (to save fuel you could use an elliptical that dips into the atmosphere and when the apogee is low enough use the engine to boost it back out of the atmosphere) then rendezvous in orbit and EVA.

[PeZook]

Does anyone have ideas on how to accomplish a manned EVE return? I've nearly given up

[OmegaChief]

Nice job, OmegaChief! A good landing is always a good feeling. Looks like you have enough fuel to make it home, too -- though I'm not spotting a parachute on this side...

I threw this rocket together thinking I'd explode on the launch pad, fail to make it to the Mun or crash and burn like all my other Mun landings, as such I didn't really give a throught to any method of return for poor Jeb here. Whoops.